Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Will the MSM now report their complicity in a deadly Palestinian/Global Intifada hoax?

After all of Richard Landes' and friends' work on reporting the decline of truth and the rise of antisemitism in France, not least in their tireless exposure of the al-Dura hoax, they're jumping for joy at the Augean Stables. A little justice has come to France.

The Jerusalem Post reports on the overturning of a libel decision that had previously gone in favour of the hoax propagators, French state-owned tv and their "journalist", Charles Enderlin:

The French Court of Appeals on Wednesday found in favor of Jewish activist Philippe Karsenty, overturning a lower court decision that he had libeled France 2 and its Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin when he accused them of knowingly misleading the watching world about the death of the Palestinian child Mohammed al-Dura in the Gaza Strip in 2000.

"The verdict means we have the right to say France 2 broadcast a fake news report, that [al-Dura's shooting] was a staged hoax and that they duped everybody - without being sued," Karsenty told The Jerusalem Post shortly after the verdict was issued at 1:30 p.m. Paris time.

Al-Dura was filmed cowering with his father Jalal behind a barrel at the Gaza Strip's Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000, during an apparent gun battle between Palestinians and Israeli troops. Fifty-five seconds of video footage were released to the world by France 2 at the time, out of some 18 minutes that were shown in court and even more footage that France 2's detractors claim is not being shown to the public.

The video, taken by Palestinian cameraman and France 2 stringer Talal Abu Rahma, shows al-Dura hiding, and then cuts to footage of him lying, apparently dead, at the junction. It does not show the child killed.

The footage, and Enderlin's broadcast assertion of Israeli responsibility for the killing of al-Dura, turned the 12-year-old's death into a cause célèbre in the Muslim world. According to Middle East and media expert Tom Gross, "Osama bin Laden referred to al-Dura in a post-9/11 video; the killers of Wall St. Journal reporter Daniel Pearl placed a picture of him in their beheading video; streets, squares and academies have been named after al-Dura. He became a poster child for the Intifada."

Karsenty, the head of the media watchdog Media Ratings, was sued for libel after calling for Enderlin's and France 2 news director Arlette Chabot's dismissal, saying the footage was "a hoax." Enderlin, who was not present in Gaza at the time of the incident, has vehemently denied the charge, expressing confidence in cameraman Abu Rahma's honesty.

Convicted of libel in 2006, Karsenty, the director of the media watchdog group Media-Ratings, was slapped with two $1,380 fines - one to be paid to France 2 and one to the station's reporter - and ordered to pay another $4,000 in court costs when he wrote that the incident constituted a "masquerade that dishonors France and its public television." On Wednesday, his appeal against that conviction was upheld.

The IDF, which initially apologized for the death of al-Dura, concluded after an investigation that the boy could not have been hit by Israeli bullets. [...]Karsenty also called on French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who Karsenty sees as "ultimately responsible" for the publicly owned television station, "to take responsibility for the French state's defense of the worst anti-Semitic lie around. It's time to apologize to the world for broadcasting a fake news report that has inflamed the Muslim world and endangered world peace."

Karsenty's claims are based on inconsistencies in the footage, including a publicly-available video-taped admission by Abu Rahma that there are untold secrets related to the case, the fact that only seven bullet holes are seen behind al-Dura despite Abu Rahma's repeated statements that the child survived 45 minutes of continuous shooting by Israeli forces directed at the boy, footage clearly showing pretend gun battles and faked ambulance runs at the junction that day, testimony of the IDF soldiers stationed at the junction who said they did not participate in any firefight that day, and the lack of footage of al-Dura's actual shooting.

Despite France 2's playing down of the verdict, some analysts believe it is significant. According to Gross, "today's ruling shows there are serious doubts about France 2's version of events, and that the entire world press was irresponsible in being so quick to take at face value the claims of a local Palestinian cameraman, who has admitted his partisanship."

Several months ago, the deputy commander of the IDF Spokesman's Office, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom, wrote to France 2 asking for the entire unedited 27-minute film shot by France 2's Palestinian cameraman on September 30, 2000, as well as footage the cameraman filmed on October 1, 2000. Am-Shalom stressed that the IDF had "ruled out" the notion that al-Dura was killed by Israeli fire.

Citing the findings of the IDF's probe into the incident, ordered by then-OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia, Am-Shalom wrote, "The general has made clear that from an analysis of all the data from the scene, including the location of the IDF position, the trajectory of the bullets, the location of the father and the son behind an obstacle, the cadence of the bullet fire, the angle at which the bullets penetrated the wall behind the father and his son, and the hours of the events, we can rule out with the greatest certainty the possibility that the gunfire that apparently harmed the boy and his father was fired by IDF soldiers, who were at the time located only inside their fixed position [at the junction]."

The invisible worm has been busy on the rose of western democracy. All over the world we have been waking up to hidden disintegration and malignant disease in places every bit as tender, intimate and sensitive to our civilization as Blakes’bed of Crimson joy was to the mythical rose.

I have watched as a group of bloggers - friends and allies of democracy - have been besieged by unprincipled, self aggrandizing, professional litigants who, using the Human Rights Commission, which was meant to be an instrument of help and shelter for the vulnerable has been turned around and made into a weapon to harass honest people into silence and to prosecute those who disagree with Progressive group-think. It is as if they woke up one morning to find the invisible worm nestled into their ears, toward their brains, telling them what not to think- what not to say, forcing them to fight an ominous but valiant struggle against the erosion of free speech in Canada.

I have seen Israel behaving as though she is powerless to defend herself from the blackest kind of blood libel. So bound to her bed and gagged is she by lawyers in the armed forces and doctrinaire judges telling her what is unthinkable, un-sayable and un-doable that her barbaric enemies make free with her honor and reputation until she cannot hold her head up in public.

Even here in the U.S. the State Department has decided that the words “jihad,” “jihadist,” and “mujahedeen” may no longer be used to describe people, most of whom proclaim themselves to be Jihadists and/or mujahedeen and who are proud enough to proclaim a Jihad against us and our government. This is not just a violation of free speech, it is suicide. What insanity is it that moves us to make it impossible to speak the name of the worm, this worm that seeks out our most vital organs of democracy and uses the very warmth and protection that nurtures our freedom to feed its greedy parasitic lethal intentions?

The name of the insanity is Demopathy. Demopathy is any action or intentional inaction which uses the language, logic and/or law of democratic society to misappropriate, weaken, undermine, subvert, or overthrow democratic society.When Jihadists and their enablers file Human Rights complaints or throw the cover of politically correct non-speech over their intention to institute a world-wide Shari’a Caliphate this is the quintessence of Demopathy. When the western mainstream media helps that same enemy to concoct frauds that impugn and parayze Israel and America it is nothing less than Demopathic treason.

11 comments:

Vancouver visitor
said...

There is something to be learned from the Pseudostinians' technique of demonizing Jews: make sure you own the propaganda in the beginning and the distorted first impression propagated by the complicit MSM that are hungry for newsworthy violent blood and gore, will be the basis on which your target populace form their opinions and decisions. The wilfully ignorant Death Hippies will swallow it wholesale and be turned into useful idiots who do the Peusdostinians' propaganda work for free. The ones who don't have time or the inclination to find out the truth will be sitting on their hands, indecisive when hard decisions need to be made. This disunity will then weaken the general support for those damned Jews.

The Left must love Islam because both are orthopraxic: so long as one says and does exactly what one is supposed to, everything is a simple grind. Everyone moves as they should, pauses at the right moments, and says as they are required. Conformity to the norms is all that matters. It's right behaviour. Why, no one will ask, is BF Skinner a psychologist? We don't ask because we know already he's a proponent of orthopraxy. People are behaviour units. That's the Left vision; it's the Muslim vision. And like it or not, it's a Human trait one finds in a segment of the population everywhere, universally. It's a part of normal psychology of normal people that there is a range of psychological types beyond which we simply cannot go. Within that there is a matter of large groupings, and nothing can change because we are human. There will always be the Left tendency. History, in that sense, has ended. How do we control the controllers, the reductionist?

The Human trait of the type above is universal. It happens that we are facing it with that lot in power. They will never go away. Expose this lie, and the liars will return with another. It's the Fate of Humans to deal with this on a continuous basis. I'm not complaining. I wasn't that busy today anyway.

It's a part of normal psychology of normal people that there is a range of psychological types beyond which we simply cannot go. Within that there is a matter of large groupings, and nothing can change because we are human. There will always be the Left tendency. History, in that sense, has ended.

Man, now you're starting to sound like a leftist!

I wouldn't say it is fundamentally a question of psychology. Individual human psychology is reductive of shared public scenes. Man models himself on the gods, not vice versa; in other words he dreams/prays of how to transcend the collective public trial; he dreams of gods, or talks/prays with the real anthropological God, and then works to make his dream possible. He acts on faith, out of sheer necessity, when the alternative of chaos and death is in his face, to realize new ideas and things.

The public, shared, scene, the scene that is always eroding and in need of renewal, is always first, not the individual "psychology" that is some kind of distillation there from. You will not find the origin of the left in the animal world, whatever else you can find there to understand certain "human" biological qualities. Anthropology, when truly realized (as it is not yet in university anthropology departments), not psychology, should be considered the king of the humanities.

And it seems to me that the ways to represent the human scene are in fact inexhaustible, though obviously there is some kind of human reality that constrains or limits what any scene can be, the reality that has been ours from the start. And there are also limits to how any particular discipline, esthetic or theoretical, can represent the human scene, and limits on how revolutionary the imagination can be.

I agree that "the left" will always be with us, in the sense that there will always be relatively more conservative and liberal positions, and there will always be people resentful of freedoms that we enjoy, and there will always be people with (sometimes good) reasons to regulate the free market. But none of this is to suggest that "the left" has to be anything like it has been historically. It too can learn and accept new freedoms.

Anyway, if some things are eternal it's not to say that history has ended; it's rather a sign of the fundamental humanness that makes history and differences possible in the first place. History begins as an overcoming of the animal pecking order; it begins with an intuition of equality - an equal sharing in the signs of language (and hence, at first, of the material things for which signs substitute) - and this is why the left is always with us. It intuits a fundamental fact of human anthropological origin. But why is it that the left cannot satisfactorily explain the origin of its own core belief in equality, as only Generative Anthropology can? The left is basically Darwinist when it comes to nature; and then they look at primitive man as some kind of equalitarian hero. What happened in between? Did the seed of the equalitarian left come to earth as space dust?

At present the left is too nihilist to want real knowledge of itself and to deal with serious ethical and moral realities that will come with real knowledge of our origins.

If the left ever gets serious about understanding itself, and surely one day they will, they may well learn that to understand the origin of our fundamental equalitarian intuition, the basis for the Golden Rule, is also to discover the basis and necessity of human freedom in exchange, and hence the necessity of an ever-unfolding array of differences that history has made possible, the differences and freedom that make human reciprocity possible, as the only alternative to the death project that is socialism.

If humanity were to go through more attempts to realize socialism, with the kind of death tolls realized in the first historical attempt, or worse, do you still maintain that the left would be incapable of learning from repeated and deadly failure?

I look at the human a a matter analogous to geometry: there are tow ends and everything else is somewhere in the middle. The ends might move to further extremes but people will mostly still be in the middle somewhere reacting to things as they always do. Like Humans. The New Man? I don't think so. It's human to be a nasty and pretty minder for a large group of people, which is why people have always had to endure them. Will they ever go away just because they're a menace to humanity? i don't see any enlightenment on the horizon. And if I'm not alive to witness it, it's really beyond my concern. Saints and sineers and all between are kind of hte nature of things. Space guys with hper-morals, maybe so with technology as it becomes, but still there will be nasty-minded cleaning ladies who grumble and PC nannies who swat at everyone. Nothing new under the Sun. We're still Human in spite of all the social engineering and yoga and vegetarianism and whatever else I'm missing.

Still human, yes; but over the long run the minders have been getting, on the one hand, relatively less powerful within the overall human network; but the power that the network can yield has grown, so that those nasty minds who can get a piece of it can be more dangerous. Stalin didn't have greater control over the minds and decisions of the average Russian, compared with the ritual minders and shamans of the ancient tribe, not that tribal minders knew exactly what it was they were doing for they were simply obeying the ritual order as they saw it; but Stalin did have much deadlier weapons and a greater self-consciousness of man as maker.

Will the expansion of freedom and the relative decline of the minders continue to go on, with fits and starts, periodic steps backwards? Perhaps, because if not it will be a bloody awful and very deadly sight to behold, given the weapons, and possibilities for economic-technological collapse and starvation, now at our disposal and available to even small groups of tech savvy resenters. But as you say, there are two poles. On the one hand, it is keeping that very real potential for cataclysm in mind, as one pole (it's imagined by both the minders and the anti-minders, with different conclusions), along with our growing respect for the new freedoms and responsibilities (the empowered citizenry protecting the nations they own - preferably in the spirit of Flight 93, but even the "minders" have their own version of free citizens) that can help defer that imagined crisis, that is the other pole. Those who seek honestly, and without self-indulgence in their own resentment, the way out of the crisis will insure we find a way forward. We demean our human potential if we laugh this possibility off as space age guys with hyper morals. The new emerges, without much fanfare, a variation on an ancient theme of liberty and life. That is why it is possible for the cynic to believe nothing new under the sun.

Why are people nasty and petty? In large part, that's not a biological question. That's their relationship to the sacred; our relationship to the sacred does change, if for no other reason that one cannot remain nasty towards the same objects forever. Nastiness erodes. Inevitably, even nastiness has to renew the objects of its resentment.

If it were really true that there is nothing new under the sun, it would go without saying. To open your mouth is to prove the possibility of the new. We are always human and also historical. The nothing new, the core humanity, is the possibility and necessity of a new way of representing the human. All forms of representation are eroded over time by our resentful sides. They must be renewed. And in doing so we do discover new things about the untold possibilities inherent in our origins. And this is not primarily a function of new technology; rather, new technology is developed and adopted as the realization of new ethical possibilities.

In other words, human nature is that which can be re-presented, be it as petty, mean, heroic, loving, courageous, etc. One can only be petty as long as one is human, i.e. re-presenting. And that is why nothing is fixed in stone except our desire to fix in stone our coreattitudes of love and resentment towards the changing forms of the sacred. But if you're going to succeed in doing that you'd better be creative. Hijacking an airliner is unlikely to get you in the history books now; and even flying planes into buildings will not have such an impact... Similarly, love, by its very nature, is "fixed" on that which is transient, mortal... one can love God, but one cannot really give a definite figure to G-d. IN future we will love new ways of keeping terminal resentment at bay. And we must find those ways, or die. These ways will be as much conservative as space-age revolutionary. In fact the ever-new of modernism is probably mostly played out now.

There will always be degrees in the material world, ends and middle. That cannot change even in weird geometric experiments. people only have so many ways of expressing themselves, and some of it is biology. The nature of life itself seems to make people conform to the continuum, whether people want to be what they are or not. Yes, everything is "new' in each peech act" if we listen to the words, but language isn't very new at all. it's Human. The core is always the same or it's not Human. Saying something different isn't to say something new. We can alter the attributes all we like but if we alter the properties we have a different thing. So it is with people. Attitudes can change, but people still have attitudes. ore and more people might come to love freedom, but there will still be those at either end who feel very differently about it from those in the middle, the mass, as it were.

Most people just don't care about much beyond their personal lives. that's to the good. If they would remain unaffected by intellectuals we'd all be better off, I think. But it's intellectuals who form public opinion and drop it from on high. It's a continuous battle that cannot end but in some kind of apocalyptic totalitarianism, a forced agreement of behaviour at some level.

Life cannot stand stasis. It's a dialectic, though, not a permanent progression toward something. And that is the telos in action. Whether it's transcendent or material, I have no idea. All that I can ever think of as better is that people are not oppressed by violence by the few. We can move that along by violence, at times. We can use violence as a force of history to move obstacles that might otherwise erode, but why not do it when we can? Look for example at the Taliban. Why wait for them to erode from history? Shoot them and protect their children from those who escape us. That kind of action is transcendent. It's not only moral it's prudent. And then one is left with a range of people who will grow into citizens according to the nature of their persons, within the life of Humanness. They will never really be good at being carrots, no matter how much they might want to be or how much better things would be if they could. But given the chance most people can be pretty good at being within the normal range of American. That is the ultimate Human potential. That's what's worth fighting for. And it's what I see as the telos of Humanness.

Within the range of American possibility is the greatest freedom man can find to be peaceable and content without harm to others. No one can rightly understand Americanism as oppressive. it's the freedom to be normal, dare I use such a term, both publicly and privately. That is the telos, I suggest, of Humanness. Being able to live in relative peace and relative affluence in public with a private life. Not much good can come from anything else, as our social gospel Protestant minders are showing so vividly. The day they're sent straight to Hell never to be seen again is the day I'll believe in God-- big-time. I'm not holding my breath. I'm not even waiting.

One can see in young children the makings of a minder. It's personality. it's gender. it's all kinds of things, and they are innate. Because we're human. The mob of intellectuals today going after Steyn is the same mob that went after Socrates. The words are different but the basic Human impulse is the same. All that changes is that we might have enough food and recreation not to care so much about what gadflies say. But there will be those who get upset because it's in the blood. And if they do go straight to Hell, we'll miss them and someone will adopt the role to replace them.

Like laundry: it's a never-ending task, this pounding down the minders.

But the problems change and grow, and this is where we learn new things about ourselves. New forms of representation and organization have to emerge. If our now global modernity is to overcome the resistance of traditional societies and their resentments of modernity, it will be through an unprecedented process by which new possibilities to transcend present conflicts emerge in this world. It's not enough, I think, to say the whole world will become "America"; sure you are using "America" metaphorically; but still, it is not possible for entire cultures just to transform themselves by act of will and one day become something they were not previously. So, much of the world will enter modernity through a long evolutionary process, through unpredictable syntheses, that will create new forms of "America". And in response to their challenges we too will have to evolve or die. Freedom is a heavy responsibility but ultimately it's that or die, change or die.

It's not that we ever lose our humanness but that the degrees of freedom and possibility in being human expand over time. We do slowly find new ways to express ourselves, without simply giving up the old. Our lives are richer than primitive man's, though we can say this and recognize our shared humanity with him. Yes, language is always human, the human is at core a linguistic being; but that's not really grounds to argue we can't say anything new. Newness, by human nature, is a differentiation within, not a radical refiguring of the human world. It's the inability to appreciate fully the nature of difference that puts the lie to both revolutionary and reactionary thinking.

One can see in children the making of a minder because ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. To become a mature adult today means to overcome our more primitive religious impulses and to respect individual freedom. Unfortunately, that's not something everyone achieves. But it is achievable for some only because we are beings who can grow, according to our very nature.

Anyone who writes "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" deserves a couple of hours of my undivided close attention.

I might agree with it, but I might have to thin it over for a long time before i decide it' actually true, given the nature of thing being not so obvious when one looks for a long time.

The rest of your comments above are equally interesting and challenging, and I haven't given them anything like the thought they deserve. It takes me long time to think about these things, and then i have to rethink it anyway. Always sparklingly bright and captivatingly interesting. Looking forward to more this evening.

Well, I think yes, the ontogeny does replicate the phylogeny, unless....

And then again, no, of course not. But what is the qualitative cut-off point; and when is the thing not itself but some other thing? And how to make it or not? Whose right is it to make or unmake? I get somewhat nervous about these things due to our political activists using the idea of 'social change' as a means of social engineering. Yes, the Frankensteins would likely be perfect among the worlds others, but the others might be just fine if they had better parents rather than better doctors. America allows for people to be who they can be without the restraints of the Doctors. Well, that is, till the Democrats take over.